During many surgical procedures for fixing fractured bones using plates and screws, the bone plates in use very often need to be deformed in-situ to facilitate the complicated, often three-dimensional fracture geometries.
Conventionally, and very often, some screws and plates which have already been fixed in place need to be removed, deformed using some common tools such as clamps, and re-screwed into the fractured bone. This frustrating process does not guarantee success, especially when complicated shape, multiple fractures are involved in the procedures. If not successful, the screwing/unscrewing process has to be repeated. Not only time-consuming, this screwing/unscrewing process can further damage the already weakened fractured bones and increase the risks of the procedures.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,746,742 discloses a bone plate template which is an easily contourable plate that is placed against a bone, and contoured using finger pressure. After it is contoured by a clinician, it is used by a technician to create a duplicate contoured bone plate for implantation. The template must, therefore, resemble its corresponding bone plate in all material aspects. Therefore, most templates are simply a silhouette of their corresponding bone plate. Such prior art templates, made from a relatively soft material such as aluminum, may still require substantial force to deform, especially to arc, which is not desirable in a confined surgical environment. Moreover, it has been observed that when soft material such as aluminum is used in a template, attempts at arcing may result in folding or kinking of the template, in the notch region. The inventors of U.S. Pat. No. 5,746,742 discover that this particular phenomena tends to disappear if the width to thickness ratio of the material of the template is kept below about 1.6:1, preferable about 1.5:1, but as low as about 1.4:1. However, the commonly encountered problem that fractured bone pieces often move during fixation (e.g. drilling) cannot be overcome according to the technique disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,746,742.